Blimey, something new on the Jalapeno blog!

It seems as though a feature of the new Twitter design has gone completely unnoticed by me! While researching the #LittleThings campaign by McDonald’s (if I’m honest, it was to see if it had gone the same way as the unfortunate McDStories hashtag from last week), I noticed that their profile had a banner running across the top promoting the campaign:

While looking great, the new feature has drawbacks. Research told me that this new feature is only available as part of ‘enhanced profiles’, which become available to brands that spend $25,000 on advertising on the social network. For big brands, this wouldn’t cause a bat of an eyelid considering promoted trends can go for around the $120,000 mark. Smaller organisations or those spending less on Twitter advertising are pretty much priced out of having this new feature.

If it’s any consolation though, I’m not entirely sold on how great this feature actually is. Banners are relatively small, un-clickable, and given the ever growing average screen size of users, offers little extra benefit than that of featuring the same content on a profile background. Also take for instance, the question of how many times people visit an actual Twitter profile. Recently, Twitter added lightbox functionality that displays a summary profile (sans pretty banner) once a Twitter handle is clicked inside a tweet, a la the following image:

Traffic through to the actual profile must be hitting an all time low (I’d love to see some stats if anyone has any!), so not having this functionality isn’t a huge loss.

What do you think? Like it? Not bothered?

Personally? It’s a nice addition, but nothing that will make a huge impact unless large amounts of traffic go through to the profile page.